'Key & Peele' returns for second season on Comedy Central

The comedy duo of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele snuck up on me with the first season of their Comedy Central sketch show, then pounced with a brilliant live performance during the May broadcast of “The Comedy Awards.” Their contribution to that live-on-tape event was Peele as President Obama and Key as Luther, his anger translator. They killed that night, and it’s become a brand-exploding bit, several installments of which are available online.

Comedy Centrall'Key & Peele.'

Click not, if profanity and irreverence buckle your knees.

“Key & Peele” returns with a new season at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday (Sept. 26).

During his hiatus between “K&P” seasons, Key came to New Orleans to act in “Hell Baby,” a horror-movie homage from writer-directors Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon due for 2013 release. Interviewed in his hotel’s lobby on a day off from filming, Key said the movie “is a comedy-comedy” that is “a great piece of craftsmanship.” His role, which he said Garant and Lennon wrote for him, is the mysterious neighbor to an expectant young couple, played by Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb, that buys a haunted New Orleans home.

“It looks and feels like a horror picture, but all of a sudden you find yourself laughing in the middle of it,” Key said. “It's not satire. It definitely honors the genre.”

Our interview didn’t come on a full day off, actually. Key was working long-distance that day with the “K&P” writers room, scripting toward a summertime taping start for the season that begins airing Wednesday. The writing task this time included extra work on standalone online pieces, which in season one had proved super-popular to the show’s core viewers.

The show did well over the old-fashioned cable wires, too: It’s winter premiere drew 2.1 million viewers, the highest premiere for the network since the 2009 launch of “The Jeff Dunham Show.”

“It's hard to get the metric nowadays about how many people are consuming the product,” said Key, a Michigan native and veteran of Chicago’s Second City and “MADtv.” “It seems like a flood of tweets some days out of nowhere, and you realize, ‘Oh, that was from a rerun.’”

Also part of the social-media mix are fan reactions to online streams of sketches or entire episodes.

“Half of our first season is online,” Key said. “I was a little concerned about that in the beginning, but that's how young people are consuming this. I think it's crucial, and I think (Comedy Central is) making a real effort to be at the forefront of it. Jordan I will be making a lot more online content.”

That’s good news for fans of the characters Vandaveon and Mike, whack webcast critics of “Key & Peele” played by Key and Peele, and thus a digital-age feedback loop that allows the performers to comment back to commenters.

“They are completely socially arrested characters who are 13 years old in their brains,” Key said. “We were sitting around and said, ‘Without being defensive or mean, how can we make an observation about a certain section of the viewing public?’ It's as much about how they consume it as it about how they criticize it.”

The characters have appeared on TV only as accompaniment to closing credits, Key said, but draw tens of thousands of clicks to their online manifestations.

“Now all our writers are crazy for the characters,” Key said. “‘We should have them in every show! We should have a whole episode of Vandaveon and Mike!’ We talked about doing a late-night show with them, a horrible spinoff.

“Now it's time to not be shy about those characters. We were fancying ourselves kind of as (digital-media) experimenters. ‘Let’s start it out there and see if it goes viral.’ It's done well, but we want everybody to see it.”

Dave Walker can be reached at dwalker@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3429. Read more TV coverage at NOLA.com/tv. Follow him at twitter.com/davewalkertp.